Have you ever had one of those days when your email inbox is ominously…silent? You realize around 1PM that you haven’t received any emails all day. You think about how odd that is, and proceed to compulsively click the “Get Mail” button on your email program. If you’re really desperate, you resort to accessing another email account and sending yourself a test email…just to make sure it’s working. You do this because you know how intangible the email process is—so doesn’t that make you wonder what could go wrong with your email newsletter?
Spam Emails
While ultimately the recipient’s email server will make the determination on whether your email is spam or not, there are some preventive steps you can take beforehand:
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Avoid using spammy words like free, guaranteed, etc. And ALL CAPS is a big no-no!
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Maintain an up to date, permission-based mailing list. Don’t assume that you have permission to market to someone via email because they were a client 5 years ago. If you send your newsletter to people that haven’t granted you permission to do so, there’s a greater chance they’ll hit that little spam button in their email program. The more recipients that hit the spam button, the worse your email reputation. Similarly, if someone asks to be removed from your mailing list, do so immediately.
Blocked Emails
Some email servers graciously block emails from addresses that do not appear in their client’s email address book. This means your newsletter may show up in their SPAM file even if you haven’t done anything to set off the SPAM filters.
Avoid this by: Asking your subscribers to add your email address to their address book when they sign up for your newsletter.
Bounced Emails
At some point in our emailing lives, we’ve all gotten that error email that says one of our recipients couldn’t be found so the email couldn’t be delivered. This is called a bounce because it means your email never got into the box you wanted it to go to and it just bounced right out of the email server and back to you.
Avoid this by: It is possible that the subscriber gave an invalid email address or that their email box is full. Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do about this but remove their email address from your list. Before you do so, make sure you do not have an error in the email address. Some common errors include:
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a comma instead of a dot
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a misspelled name
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a space instead of an underscore
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.com instead of .org (or vice versa)